“These are the times that try men’s souls,” the famous patriot Thomas Paine wrote in the bleak winter of 1776 when it looked like we might lose our war of independence against Great Britain.
Union men and women will again face soul-trying times starting Jan. 20 when president-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated for the second time.
“The idea that Donald Trump has ever, or will ever, care about working people is demonstrably false,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler warned in 2023 when he seemed to be a shoo-in for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. “For his entire time as president, he actively sought to roll back worker protections, wages, and the right to join a union at every level.”
The Republican Trump was the most anti-union president since the GOP trio of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. In office from 1921 to 1933, their greed-is-good, make-the-rich-richer, union-busting policies led to the Great Depression, the worst economic catastrophe in our history.
On the other hand, Democrat Joe Biden, the only president to walk a picket line, was the most labor-friendly president since Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who succeeded Hoover, wrote University of Rhode Island historian Erik Loomis in an Ohio Capital Journal op-ed last May. “Based on my research regarding the history of organized labor in America, I would give Biden an A-minus for his record on workers rights. in my view, the man dubbed ‘Union Joe‘ has lived up to the claim, with one notable error.”
What was the “one notable error”? Loomis noted that Biden invoked the Railway Labor Act of 1926 to keep rail unions from striking for improved sick leave in 2022. “Biden officials argued that the economy could not afford a rail shutdown, but political considerations around inflation before the midterm elections probably contributed to the administration’s response.” Yet Loomis conceded that simultaneously, “the Biden administration continued working behind the scenes to pressure rail companies to grant the workers their demands, and they largely did. Union leaders credit Biden for helping them get this victory for their workers.”
But Loomis pointed out that Roosevelt enjoyed whopping Democratic majorities in the House and Senate “when he signed into law two measures that safeguard U.S. labor rights to this day: the National Labor Relations Act, which protects the right of private sector workers to organize unions without fear of retaliation, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and made most child labor illegal.
“Biden, in contrast, has had to contend with a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate throughout his presidency, and the Republicans gained a slim House majority in the 2022 midterm elections.
“He’s also seeking to expand labor rights at a time when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been consistently ruling against unions.”
Trump will be even worse this time around
Veteran Kentucky union activist Kirk Gillenwaters expects the new Trump administration to be even more hostile to unions than the first one. “Just look at Project 2025 – it’s their playbook,” said Gillenwaters, president of the Kentucky Alliance for Retired Americans and a Louisville United Auto Workers Local 862 retiree member.
When journalists on the campaign trail asked Trump about Project 2025, he reprised Sgt. Schultz’s legendary alibi on the old Hogan’s Heroes TV show: “I know nothing.”
Yet the president-elect “has since nominated several authors or contributors from the controversial conservative presidential wish list to his administration,” reported Kiara Alfonseca and Katherine Faulders of ABC News.
Trump — who is openly pro-“right to work” — also insists that he’s in labor’s corner. “But an analysis of the labor chapter of Project 2025 – an ambitious rightwing plan to guide the next Republican presidency – found it has little to offer [workers],” wrote Steven Greenhouse in The Guardian. “Project 2025’s labor section proposes hardly anything to improve workers’ wages and working conditions. It is, however, chock full of recommendations that would boost corporate profits, undercut labor unions, and advance the rightwing culture war.” Greenhouse said “Project 2025 would weaken unions or make life tougher for them in at least a dozen ways.”
Gillenwaters encourages union members to read all 920 pages of Project 2025 . It’s online.
Target #1: the NLRB
He expects Trump to again zero in on the National Labor Relations Board, which he steeply slanted toward business in his first term. “Trump stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union appointees who side with employers in contract disputes and support companies who delay and stall union elections, misclassify workers to take away their freedom to join a union, and silence workers,” according to the Communications Workers of America.
The NLRB, which monitors unfair labor practices and mediates labor-management disagreements, “has become an aggressive union booster under Biden,” wrote NBC News’s Davis Giangiulio. “While the agency’s policies typically shift depending on who’s in the White House, the change has been pronounced, labor experts and former NLRB staffers say.”
Once Trump is sworn in, his “administration is expected to revert the board to the pro-business, anti-union agency that it was during his first term,” wrote Michael Arria in truthout. “This means workers’ rights will inevitably be rolled back, and much of the progress made over the past four years could be lost.”
Added Gillenwaters: “We need to keep our members informed about how Trump’s actions go against our ability to function as unions and to expand in the future, how they will diminish workers’ rights, and how they will make our fight more difficult.”
The social-issues scam
In addition, Gillenwaters said union leaders must continue to expose the GOP’s long-running social issues scam, which the party concocted to divide working class voters. One Kentucky union activist calls the con “The Three Gs: God, guns, and gays.” Of late, they’ve added a “T” for trans.
Warned Gillenwaters: “Here’s the bottom line: This is a tactic conservatives have long used against working families – working men and women – to get them to vote against their own self-interest. That’s where we are today. A lot of people put more weight on those issues that don’t pertain to their jobs when they vote.”
The social issues ploy began in earnest when Republican Ronald Reagan (who was also fiercely anti-union) ran for president in 1980. The idea was “to distract and manipulate working class voters,” wrote Wisconsin State AFL-CIO researcher Joanne Ricca in “Politics in America: The Right Wing Attack on the American Labor Movement,” a paper published in 2002.
Ricca added: “The Right’s deliberate manipulation of voters through single issues — particularly abortion, gun control, school prayer, crime, and taxes — has allowed candidates to conceal their real pro-corporate, anti-worker agenda.”
Hence, “single issue politics was absolutely key to building the electoral base that the Right had lacked,” Ricca explained. Firmly wedded to the Religious Right, conservative Republicans trotted out “scripture to mask Right Wing ideology,” according to Ricca. “Now they could convince sincere working people to vote against their own economic interests by manipulating their religious faith. Now they would be beyond criticism. They could attack anyone who tried to expose the real pro-corporate and anti-democratic agenda as being anti-Christian.”
The fight is on – summer soldiers and sunshine patriots need not apply
In that same pamphlet, Thomas Paine also wrote: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions — including mine — will be anything but summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, according to the federation’s “2024 Year-End Report,” authored by Shuler and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond.
They recalled that “2024 saw historic gains for working people from the Biden-Harris administration, including the executive order on good jobs to promote project labor agreements, voluntary recognition and neutrality; an Occupational Safety and Health Administration standard to protect workers from extreme heat; a National Labor Relations Board decision to ban captive-audience meetings; a Department of Labor proposed rule to end the sub-minimum wage for workers with disabilities; and the signing of the Social Security Fairness Act into law to repeal the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO) for public sector workers.”
They pledged that “the AFL-CIO will keep fighting any efforts to overturn these and all gains we’ve made together with the Biden-Harris administration over the past four years, and to prevent the radical Project 2025 agenda from harming our members and wrecking our right to organize. And we will not stop fighting for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, and labor law reform to rewrite the rules that have systematically locked workers out of organizing. The labor movement has lived through difficult moments before. We’ve weathered the storm in the past, and we’ll do it again now. Sticking together and fighting back in unity will be critical.”
Paine conceded that “tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
So it is with unions facing four more years of Donald Trump as union-buster-in-chief. The conflict will be hard; let us hope the triumph, in the end, is glorious.
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